RILM Abstracts of Music Literature is an international database for
musicological and ethnomusicological research, providing abstracts and indexing
for users all over the world. As such, RILM’s style guide (How to Write
About Music: The RILM Manual of Style) differs fairly significantly from
those of more generalized style guides such as MLA or APA.

Opera in the British Isles might seem a rather sparse subject in the period 1875 to 1918. Notoriously described as the land without music, even the revival of the native tradition of composers did not include a strong vein of opera.

Assumptions about later Italian opera are dominated by Puccini, but Alfredo Catalani, born in the same town and almost at the same time, was highly regarded by their contemporaries. Two new books on Catalani could change our perceptions.

I was feeling cowed by Herr Engels. The four of us had retired from the Stravinsky performance to a Billy Wilder-themed bar in Berlin, the least horrible late-night option in the high end mediocrity of Potsdamer Platz.

This substantial book is one of the latest in the Ashgate series of
collected essays in opera studies and draws together articles from a disparate
group of scholarly journals and collected volumes, some recent, some now
difficult to locate.

Originally published in German as Herrin des Hügels, das Leben der Cosima Wagner (Siedler, 2007), this new book by Oliver Hilmes is an engaging portrait of one of the most important women in music during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Ralph Locke’s recent book on Musical Exoticism is both an historical survey of aspects of the exotic in Western musical culture and a discussion of paradigms of the exotic and their relevance for musicological understanding.

Perhaps it will be enough to tell you that I wasn’t halfway through this book before I searched the web for a copy of Professor Ewans’s study of Wagner and Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and ordered it forthwith: It has to be good.

Two excellent books on opera have come to hand, providing many hours of entertaining reading. I combine notice of them with a few thoughts about composer Paul Moravec’s CDs, and his forthcoming opera premiere at Santa Fe Opera in 2009.

He wanted these pieces to
entertain his guests at a party for the visiting Prince Albert of Sachsen-Teschen and
his wife, Marie Christine (Joseph’s sister). From stages set up at opposite ends of the
Orangerie at Schönbrunn, the Italian troupe performed Salieri’s Prima
la musica e poi le parole, and the German troupe put on Mozart’s Der
Schauspieldirektor. The evening highlighted Joseph’s love of competition in
music: between composers, librettists, singers, and languages. Both these pieces
represent what Betzwieser calls “metamelodramma,” that is, an opera in which the subject
of the plot is opera itself. (I prefer John Rice’s term “self-parody.”) This is not a
new category of theater, and these are not the last examples. Benedetto Marcello poked
fun at operatic excesses in his satirical tract Teatro alla moda (1720). From
the eighteenth century there are several parody operas: Domenico Scarlatti’s La
Dirindina (1715), Domenico Sarri’s L’impresario delle isole Canarie
(1724), and F. L. Gaβmann’s Opera Seria (Calzabigi’s libretto La
critica teatrale), 1769; more recently, one thinks of Richard Strauss’s
Capriccio (1942), which was inspired by the Salieri work, and even the
likes of “Chorus Line” and other Broadway musicals. Moreover, the debate over which
should have primacy, words or music, goes further back into the history of music:
Monteverdi clashed with Artusi over the “prima prattica” and “seconda prattica,” and
Gluck endeavored to reform opera seria.

Salieri’s one-act divertimento teatrale has a cast of four characters, each
depicting a player in the creation of an opera: the Maestro (bass), the Poet (bass),
Eleonora (soprano), a prima donna, representing opera seria, and Tonina
(soprano), an opera buffa singer. The plot lampoons everyone and everything in
opera production. The Poet is obliged to write his verses to music already composed by
the Maestro, who cares nothing about expressing the words in the music. Both singers try
to use unfair influence. Seria and buffa elements (normally kept
strictly apart) collide in a duet of two simultaneous arias, in which Eleonora sings
hers in the serious style and Tonina sings hers in the comic style. And so on.

Salieri was fortunate to collaborate with the skilled librettist, Giovanni Battista
Casti, whose dramaturgy easily surpasses that of Mozart’s librettist, Johann Gottlieb
Stephanie. The editor observes: “Casti’s and Salieri’s opera is incomparably richer in
allusion than its German counterpart.” This very genius, however, contained the seeds of
its own destruction. What was readily apparent to 18th-century Viennese audiences, but
unlikely to be perceived by today’s listeners are the musical references to and
quotations from popular operas of the time. Opera fans will recognize this technique
from the supper scene in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, where the composer quotes from
operas by Martin, Sarti, and his own Figaro. In Prima la musica,
Salieri borrowed much more extensively. The editor cites three long “complexes of
quotations” from Giuseppe Sarti’s Giulio Sabino, including a castrato aria
transferred here to female soprano. Thus, laden with allusions to the Viennese operatic
world and bearing myriad quotations, Salieri’s opera was not “viable” beyond the
imperial city, where it received only three more performances. This fate sets it apart
from his many operas that achieved wide-spread popularity, and made him one of the most
celebrated composers in Europe.

Despite its short run, Prima la musica represents Salieri at the height of his
musical and dramatic creativity. The score masterfully entwines the serious and comic,
taking many colorful twists and turns. The action entertains by farce, absurdity, even
slapstick. On the whole, it stands up well against the inevitable comparison with the
Mozart companion piece. (May I suggest that to solve the problem of unrecognizable
quotations we should revive Sarti’s Giulio Sabino.)

Prima la musica was published in a vocal score by Schott in 1972, and it has
been revived in performance a number of times since then. Nikolaus Harnoncourt directed
a production in Vienna in 2005. The present publication is the first “Urtext” and
critical edition. The vocal score, extracted from the critical edition, has the text in
Italian with a good singing German translation. The full score and orchestral parts are
available as rental. According to the preface to the vocal score, Betzwieser examined
all the surviving sources (the composer’s autograph score and three manuscript copies),
and it seems evident from the vocal score that the edition has been carefully prepared.
This publication of Salieri’s Prima la musica e poi le parole is a welcome
addition to the growing corpus of Salieri’s works available in good critical editions.